Posted on December 9, 2014 by Glenn Gow

As Marketing has gained responsibility for what was traditionally the realm of Sales, corporate marketing solutions have become increasingly attentive to mid-funnel nurturing activities that occur close to the conversion point and can affect quarterly business results. While the ability to turn qualified leads into paying customers remains important, says Manny Kostas, CMO of security corporation Symantec, there is more to it than that. Focusing on initial awareness of soft leads, and securing the renewal of existing customers is just as important to business growth. In this Moneyball for Marketing podcast, Manny shares his knowledge on how to create a marketing system that offers early value to buyers and keeps providing value long after they have already become customers:

Journey, not Destination: “Once the buyer becomes a customer … we shouldn’t wait until the renewal period…to look at them as a lead for a renewal,” says Manny. Instead, he urges marketers to attend to the Buyer’s Journey and the Customer’s Journey as separate marketing systems. Manny gives tips on how to harness insights from existing buyers as well as how to delight customers to increase renewal rates.

Top of the Funnel: The upper part of the funnel is under-invested-in, says Manny, pointing out the challenges in both marketing technology and mentality that are preventing marketers from recognizing multi-channel early attribution sources. Manny explains why the propensity at top-of-funnel is important and shares one marketing solution that Symantec is currently testing to leverage that part of the cycle.

Data Due Diligence: Manny breaks down Symantec’s data management philosophy into steps—first segmenting data, then assigning value to the data that is most important to business, and finally trying to pull data from all the IT tools out there to form an actionable, holistic marketing system.

Manny Kostas is the CMO of Symantec Corporation. As of October 9th, 2014 Symantec declared that the company would be separated into two independently publicly traded companies. One company will focus on security while the other on information management. Manny has previously held several executive marketing roles at HP and Polycom, and holds a Masters of Management from Northwestern University.